I attended Finovatethis week to get a preview of new financial services digital technology vendors. I say preview because if you have ever been to Finovate, you know it’s a little like speed dating, where 63 vendors have 7 minutes each to show you their best moves.  The themes at Finovate this year were not much different as previous years with the focus being on mobile banking, personal financial management, and payments.  However, this year, a few new topics emerged:  rewards, coupons, and mobile banking services for Pre-Paid Visas customers.  Apparently, Pre-Paid Visas are the new black. 

 While there was plenty of interesting and innovative demonstrations, Forrester attended the conference to identify trends and solutions relevant for our retail digital financial services clients. Specifically, we looked at innovative solutions for our clients related to mobile banking, personal financial management, and payments. The following vendors stood out as innovative solutions for mobile banking, personal financial management, and payments:

•  DWOLLAis a next-generation social, mobile and online payment network. Its financial service product, FiSynch, integrates its technology into financial institutions.
• IP Commercesolves the development challenge of multi-payer acceptance and multi-payee disbursement
• iQuantifiprovides users with automated and personalized financial advice online
• Money Desktopoffers the next generation of personal financial management.  Its slick design makes excellent use of the native app features. 

As a new analyst researching vendors for digital banking, I wanted to share an observation as eBusiness and Channel Strategists are making decisions about digital financial services investments. In the last few months, I’ve interviewed personal financial management vendors and banks about their PFM implementations. One notable theme is bubbling up to the surface, what role does PFM play in online banking’s future? 

 With notable success in driving higher engagement, vendors and banks report that customers spend between a 2-4x more time in PFM than online banking. While both online banking and PFM have similar goals to increase retention, cross-sell, loyalty, and provide customers with greater insight into their financial picture, both offer different customer experiences. Functionally, the main difference is that online banking supports transfer and self-service capabilities, while PFM does not support transferring capabilities and may loosely, at best, integrate self-service. The biggest difference is customer experience.

• Online banking is transactional in nature. You go there to view your balance, schedule payments, and make transfers. You get in, you get out. Most institutions have masters pushing high volume, low complexity account maintenance tasks to digital channels. The focus has mainly been on automating these capabilities to reduce manual processing to gain further cost efficiencies.